CNET.com - News - Entertainment & Media - IE feature can track Web surfers without warning.

Microsoft today said it is investigating a possible privacy loophole in its Internet Explorer browser that could thwart efforts by people who want to surf the Web anonymously. The feature in IE 5 and above, referred to by Microsoft as "persistence," is designed to let Web pages remember information, such as search queries, entered by visitors.

But privacy advocates complain, and Microsoft today acknowledged, that the trade-off for that convenience is that Web sites could uniquely identify visitors as they return over time--without any warning from IE.

The discovery of these potential privacy leaks highlights the difficulties Web surfers face in protecting their personal data online. While high assurances of privacy are hard to come by on the Net, new versions of products with new features may always threaten to undermine steps to guard against online snooping that have proven effective in the past.

LA Times - Government Computers Remain at Risk. Web: Lack of progress in online security exposes federal sites to hacker attacks, leaves taxpayer data vulnerable, GAO report says.

 In one instance, the report said, GAO staffers were able to gain access to Defense Department workers' Social Security numbers, address and pay information through a file that was publicly available over the Internet. In another, a worker at the Social Security Administration pleaded guilty last year to illegally accessing government computers for months to obtain earnings information about local businesses.

Yahoo News - Government Computer Security Gets Low Grade.

A House of Representatives panel gave the federal government on Monday a barely passing grade of D-minus for computer security, warning of a growing threat to a wide range of critical operations and data.

Lapses at all 24 bureaucracies reviewed ``place a broad array of federal operations and assets at risk of fraud, misuse and disruption,'' said the General Accounting Office (GAO), the non-partisan investigative arm of Congress.

Based on the GAO audit and on self-reported data from the agencies and their inspectors-general, the House Subcommittee on Government Management, Information and Technology handed out a failing F grade to more than one in four of the major U.S. bureaucracies.

Receiving F's were the departments of Health and Human Services, Agriculture, Justice, Labor and Interior as well as the Small Business Administration and the Office of Personnel Management, the federal human resources office.

The Defense Department earned only a D-plus in what panel chairman Stephen Horn, a California Republican, called the first such ``report card'' on government-wide information practices.

Slashdot | US Government Computer Security Evaluated.

San Jose Mercury News - Western Union Web site hacked; credit cards numbers taken.

Hackers stole credit and debit card information from 15,700 online customers of Western Union, whose Web site was unprotected while undergoing maintenance.

By Sunday evening, no cases of credit card fraud had been reported to the Englewood, Colo.-based company, and only customers who used the Web site to transfer money remain at risk, said Peter Ziverts, a Western Union spokesman.

The company began notifying customers of the problem on Friday, when the computer attack was first detected. By late Sunday, Visa International and MasterCard International Inc. had been contacted so that cardholders' accounts could be monitored for possible fraud.

GigaLaw.com(By Stan Morris): Regulating 'Decency' Online: Analyzing the Past and Predicting the Future. The U.S. Supreme Court in 1997 struck down a large part of the Communications Decency Act, which attempted to restrict the transmission of "indecent" and "patently offensive" speech on the Internet. But regulating speech is something the courts have dealt with for a very long time. This article explores the history and future of these efforts.

(CNSNews.com) - Who Has the Right to Know:  The Battle Over Consumer Privacy.

With many private citizens and businesses concerned about the erosion of privacy and the way personal information is collected and distributed, privacy issues - and the technology that can compromise it -- are increasingly surfacing in policy and legislative debates.

Corporate executives and policy experts are hoping to chime in on the issue this week as they gather in Washington, D.C. for a Global Privacy Summit, designed to lay out the terms of a technology and privacy agenda for both businesses and politicians alike.

ZDNet: InterActive Week: Trading Net Privacy At E-Checkout. Then there's Amazon.com. On Aug. 31, the Web's most famous retailer dumped its long-standing practice of not selling, trading or renting customer information in favor of a policy that says the company collects every scrap of data provided by its customers and considers that collection a key asset that could be sold.

globetechnology.com - Privacy watchdog opposes bid for phone user data.

However, the proposals, from Bell Canada and a network security working group at the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, are running into strong opposition from the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, which sees them as another assault on people's ability to control personal information. As well, they have received mixed reviews from organizations such as the B.C. Civil Liberties Association.

The CRTC working-group proposal calls for the establishment of a national system through which police forces and other agencies, including the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, could find out which of the growing number of telephone companies is providing service to a particular individual -- without having to get a warrant.

GigaLaw.com(By Shubha Ghosh): Analyzing "Fair Use" and the First Amendment on the Internet. A number of Internet cases highlight the interaction between the "fair use" doctrine in copyright law and the First Amendment. In one case, a court ruled that MP3.com committed copyright infringement by allowing users to access CDs online, but in another case a court ruled against a photographer whose works were copied by a "visual search engine." This article explains the laws affecting these online businesses.